The Burma Railway
was built by the Japanese in 1943 to support their war effort. It travelled 258 miles between Thailand and Burma. The effort became infamous as reports of the
brutality inflicted on laborers enslaved for the effort from the pools of
natives and prisoners of war. Perhaps
the most familiar depiction occurred in the movie The Bridge over the River Kwai.
More recently, the building of the railway was described in the film The Railway Man, and in the
award-winning novel The Narrow Road to
the Deep North by Richard Flanagan.
From Wikipedia
we derive this information:
“Forced labour was used in its
construction. More than 180,000—possibly many more—Asian civilian labourers (Romusha)
and 60,000 Allied prisoners of war (POWs) worked on the railway. Of these,
estimates of Romusha deaths are little more than guesses, but probably about
90,000 died. 12,621 Allied POWs died during the construction. The dead POWs
included 6,904 British personnel, 2,802 Australians, 2,782 Dutch, and 133 Americans.”
“After the end of World War II,
111 Japanese and Koreans were tried for war crimes because of their
brutalization of POWs during the construction of the railway, with 32 of these
sentenced to death.”
There seems to be precise data on the mortality rate for
prisoners of war. The brutality leading
to a mortality level of 21% was deemed so extreme that 32 people were executed as
war criminals for their actions.
Given that background, it was rather startling to encounter
this statement by Steve Fraser in his book The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power.
“Some didn’t survive the ordeal,
having been worked to death: 44 percent of the 285 convicts building the South
Carolina Greenwood and Augusta Railroad died.
The mortality rate among convict laborers in Alabama was 45 percent.”
The United States had railroad construction projects in
late nineteenth century where the death rate was twice that on the infamous
Burma Railway, where the treatment of the prisoner laborers was considered a
crime against humanity?
Fraser was referring to the system of convict leasing that became common in
states of the South in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The South had the will and the power to re-enslave
the recently freed black slaves.
“Making sure the supply of
coerced workers was ample became a function of the region’s policing and
judicial systems. wholesale arrests
among black men in Georgia and throughout the South for disobeying a boss,
being impudent, gambling, partying, talking to a white woman, having lascivious
sex, riding freight cars without a ticket, vagrancy, or even for just being out
of work produced a robust supply of convict labor at harvest time or when
railroad track needed to be laid or phosphate mined.”
“In the South, convict leases
provided workers for cotton plantation, mining, lumbering, and turpentine camps
as well as for quarries, dockyards, and road-building projects; Alabama derived 73 percent of its state revenue
from leasing convicts. Nor was this flow
of unfree labor restricted to regional industries and agribusinesses. Large, northern-headquartered banks and
corporations were complicit.”
More information on this disgraceful practice can be
found in Wikipedia.
“Convict leasing was a system of
penal labor practiced in the Southern United States. Convict leasing provided
prisoner labor to private parties, such as plantation owners and corporations….The
lessee was responsible for feeding, clothing, and housing the prisoners.”
“It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum
South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery
did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to
the next. But it was nonetheless slavery – a system in which armies of free
men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to
labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to
do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of
extraordinary physical coercion.”
This cruel system was allowed to continue for several
generations.
“U.S. Steel is among American
companies who have acknowledged using African-American leased convict labor. The practice peaked around 1880, was formally
outlawed by the last state (Alabama) in 1928, and persisted in various forms
until it was abolished by President Franklin D. Roosevelt via Francis Biddle's ‘Circular
3591’ of December 12, 1941.”
Fraser was providing examples of what he referred to as “primitive
accumulation” of capital. That term is
usually reserved for the initial accumulation of capital/wealth in a capitalist
system, but it is possible to conclude that “primitive accumulation” is an
ongoing process and “primitive” does not merely refer to an original trend but
rather to a fundamental process. In Fraser’s
view, “primitive accumulation” is accumulation of capital/wealth by taking
wealth from someone else—a never ending process.
The most obvious example of “accumulation by
dispossession” is slavery where people are deprived of their freedom in order
to gain access to their unlimited labor.
It is rather disconcerting to realize that forms of legalized “slavery”
existed in our country until well into the twentieth century.
Yes, we are an exceptional nation!
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